Man I just read all 5 pages in the span of like 1 hour, and wow was there a lot of bullshit.
To clarify, I myself am an agnostic. A lot of my views are fairly similar to what Dinav, Sniffles and even Ruby have already said. I will not put down your religion. (Although I must say I was very uneducated when I was younger; I grew up in an Asian Buddhist household and while I was *required* to pray to certain gods and goddesses and attend temple every few months, I never really bothered to learn the purpose and ideals of my own religion. Hell, I even attended one of those Christian day-care type schools when I was young, where they show those Bible cartoons, haha.) If there is a god and you believe in him, power be unto you. But I am very much a realist in my views that if you go out of your way to put people down for any reason, be it homosexuality, different beliefs or even race, then you are truly a tremendous dredge on our society.
I think Rein put it best, I believe people are naturally born happy, and it is their societies that curb and shape their beliefs and ideals. If you are of a certain religion, just think of this, let's say you were raised until different beliefs, and you followed them, how can you say any religion is correct? Also, to whoever stated that they were raised in a *good* environment and implied that this was brought upon by their beliefs, this is pure bullshit. I know and I'm sure you do too, that there are people living *good* that are hardcore atheists, or people that live in complete poverty and may be devout believers, that's not factor in what is true or not.
This is just to Foss and Unick, this thread was started as a discussion and proposedly *friendly* debate, but you two have done plenty of blatent (and rather blind) condescending, implications, and just plain bad attitude. I'm not fully educated in either science nor religion, but I am sane enough to notice that your discussions are full of hypocrisy. "You can't prove god isn't real so he must be, hmm" "I don't care what you believe but I am going to post how you are wrong." Wtf? Why would you post if you didn't care? Honestly, what you believe in if fine, but when you make comments like this it just shows how shortsighted you are as a person. It doesn't matter how well versed you are or how many degrees at YOUR university you have, you believe in what you believe.
I thought a lot of the earlier posts were very enlightening, albeit long and arduous at 6am

but a lot of the latter were nothing but power trips and self righteous blasphemy (Man I love that word) Hell, if anyone is versed in the beliefs of Buddhism I would love to learn more about it; I do believe religion was created as a tool to control, but while there have been much pain and suffering from it, a lot of people's lives have turned out for the better. Hypocrisy is the one true religion!